Nikki Pike is one of Colorado’s busiest artists, and easily one of its most intriguing (and entertaining), so it is not uncommon to encounter her objects in outdoor settings here.
Pike makes work from various materials and with different aims, but she is best known for her oversized, public sculptures created out of tree bark. You might have passed by one or two while strolling through a park or hiking along a mountain trail. Or maybe you know her bronze piece — the giant sphere titled “Rondure” — that sits on the front lawn of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. It’s a crowd-pleaser.
Pike’s latest endeavor changes the backdrop a bit, and offers a whole new perspective on this bark-based work. It’s an indoor solo show, titled “Echoes from the Forest” at Space Gallery, a traditional white cube exhibition space in the Santa Fe arts district.
Her three-dimensional pieces are paired with concurrent solo shows by painters Susan M. Gibbons and Jeff Juhlin, and all three artists present something of an updated version of traditional Western art landscapes. It’s a high-level combo of regional artists who ask us to see the local landscape, a place we think we know so well, in deeper ways.
Pike’s work stands out here because it is not the usual stuff of formal art galleries. For one thing, it can be rather large. One piece in this show, titled “Ovum,” which is shaped like a giant seed and sits in the middle of the gallery floor, is 11 feet long and just under 6 feet tall.
But it is the material that is jarring for viewers. Pike’s work comes off as organic when it is viewed outdoors, among trees that are also made of bark, almost like an extension of nature itself. But here, removed and isolated from that obvious natural habitat, we are invited to look at them from a more intellectual perspective. To see them as high-end art commodities we might acquire for our personal spaces rather than whimsical public art projects intended to please the masses.
The setting is a revelation and, perhaps, a better way to understand Pike’s goal of inviting “the viewer to consider the human connection to and impact on the natural world,” as she says in her artist’s statement. Because we get a better grasp on her process.
I understand it like this:
Humans like things arranged in neat rows. We like the clean right angles of a square and perfect circles. We make sense of our world by putting it in order, making it symmetrical when we can, controlling things. Otherwise, we see chaos.
Nature does not place such constrictions upon itself. Animals roam freely without the need for paved paths. Seeds fall wherever they might and trees sprout up randomly. They drop their leaves in the autumn without caring if someone rakes them up or not. Chaos is the natural order
Pike’s work bridges that gap. Her raw material — rough bark that has been neither hewed nor polished — is gathered together and then arranged in perfect geometrical shapes that appeal to the human eye.
Her “Nova,” for example, is a neatly arranged circle measuring nearly 5 feet in diameter. Her “Totem” is a diamond-shaped object made from triangles. The pieces are three-dimensional, though flat on the back so they hang on a wall. They are sculptures, though they have the personalities of reliefs.
But her trick in all of these exacting arrangements is to let the bark remain natural, splintery and papery, and to let its personality come through. And by doing this, we get a real sense of both the possibilities and limits of how humans and nature can co-exist.
Humans do have considerable power to bend nature to their wishes — especially if they apply the brute force required to make these sculptures. But when we respect the natural properties of the material we are shaping, the relationship can actually be quite beautiful, and logical, and work in every entity’s best interest.
It’s an inspirational lesson on co-existence that is not so easily read in a park, where there are so many visual and audio distractions, but which becomes fundamentally clear in a gallery. It’s a meaningful elevation of Pike’s work and one that deserves to be seen.
Gibbons has her own way of collaborating with nature, and it gives her landscapes on display here considerable depth. She makes her own paint out of the dirt and rocks she finds in Colorado and New Mexico and applies it in a watercolor-like way to Japanese paper.
Graphite marks etch out the details of the terrain above ground and below it, so we see both rolling hills on the Earth’s surface and the layers of sedimentary rock beneath it. She likens her landscapes to portraiture where an artist attempts to capture the facts of a person’s face, but also to reveal the character underneath.
It is deeply spiritual work that suggests the planet has more to offer than what we give it credit for. There is a soul, and we can tap into it, commune with it, if we acknowledge and embrace that things that are not obvious.
Gibbons fits in neatly here with his own rich landscapes that combine the breadth of traditional oil-paint landscapes of the West with the sharp lines and visual divisions you might see in a classic collage. The works are colorful and chunky.
He starts by using oil or acrylic paint to depict the wide-open skies he sees around him in the rocky plains of Wyoming and Utah. Then he adds to the surface “Asian papers that are stained and somewhat translucent,” as he says in his artist’s statement. The papers come together to depict the land.
The paper is arranged in long, narrow horizontal strips that mirror the layers of rock and soil that make up the Earth’s outer surface. His work asks us to look at the planet’s present form as well as its history of growing and evolving over time, and to consider our personal relationships with this cycle.
The same is true of the work presented here by Pike and Gibbons. They all want to bring us closer to nature, to help us respect it, but also to partner with it in ways that make sense — and while giving all due respect to both the planet’s ecological needs and our human desires to understand and control our surroundings.
It is a challenge for commercial art galleries to assemble multiple shows at once, and to build connections between artists with different ideas and approaches to their work. This trio of exhibitions stares that down; it is cohesive, enlightening, and very much a Western affair.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.
IF YOU GO
The three exhibitions continue through May 24 at Space Gallery, 400 Santa Fe Drive. They are free. Info: 303-993-3321 or spacegallery.org.
